couple of months ago, Wayne Mardle was filming a celebrity episode of the ITV gameshow Bullseye when he was gripped by a strange and unfamiliar sensation. You might think that, as a former professional darts player and now one of the sport’s most recognisable commentators, performing on television is the last thing that would faze him. But as he prepared to go on stage in tandem with the former Coronation Street actor Angela Griffin, some old demons began to resurface. In an instant, Mardle remembered why he had given up the game more than a decade ago. “I can honestly say I was fraught with the pressure, with the tension,” he says. “My head was swimming, my arm was tight, my hand was cold, my feet were freezing. I don’t want to be that pressurised ever again. And you know what? I absolutely hated it.” It is a recollection that may surprise those who remember Mardle as one of the sport’s consummate showmen. Back then it was the loud Hawaiian shirts and the dancing on stage; these days it is his strident, surgical punditry for Sky Sports. But over the course of an hour-long interview, and the memoir it is promoting, what becomes clear is that behind the flamboyant character of “Hawaii 501” lies a man defined as much by reflection and regret as by pride and big-time swagger. He was some player in his heyday, emerging out of the pubs of Essex to become one of the sport’s superstars. Like his mentor Bobby George, Mardle threw with a street fighter’s heart and a conjuror’s flourish: playing up to the crowd, grinding out the big moments, milking the spotlight for all he could. He reached five world championship semi-finals between 2001 and 2008. Then, suddenly, it evaporated. At the start of 2009, Mardle was still a top 10 player. By 2011 it was all over: his game in pieces, his self-esteem at rock-bottom, retired before age 40. In retrospect, he realises now, his game never really recovered from an excruciating bout of mumps that put him out of action for six months. “My wife said it finished me off,” he says. “She said I lost my fight after that. My form went pretty quickly, and I just thought it would turn around. It doesn’t. You have to really work at it. Unfortunately you live and learn, and I learned that bit too late.” What did he learn? “My problem,” he explains, “is that I thought I’d be doing it for ever. And you keep wasting opportunities. Sometimes it’s through being unprofessional, like when I went on a 48-hour gambling and drinking bender before the Desert Classic final [in 2005]. But there’s times when you just lose and think: ‘I’ll be all right.’ I just wasn’t that driven. “I really loved the game. I still do. But in a sad way, now I look back, it’s a regret that winning or losing wasn’t that much to me. I never had it in me to be this relentless winning beast. I’ve known [16-time world champion] Phil Taylor for 20 years, and that man would do anything in his power to be better than anyone else. I was all right just being me.” This is why his playing career is defined by those what-ifs. Perhaps the biggest came in 2008, when Mardle beat Taylor at the world championships only to lose to the unfancied Kirk Shepherd in the last four. “My attitude was terrible,” he admits. “I knew I was miles better than him. I was mocking him in the practice room about his lack of ability – jovial, but behind it there was a nastiness that I’d never really shown before. Or since.” Still, Mardle’s colourful persona made him a natural fit for television, where – along with the likes of Gary Neville, Will Greenwood and Nasser Hussain – he became one of a new generation of Sky commentators offering not just opinions but intelligent, granular analysis. Mardle himself drew inspiration from the likes of Butch Harmon in golf, whose forensic punditry catered to a more engaged, knowledgable audience. “Back in my day, there was no such thing as darts coaching,” Mardle says. “Now we live in a more analytical world. Everything is driven by proof of performance. People want to know why the dart’s going low-left, or flying high-right. Back in my day, apart from averages, there was none of that.” Not everyone feels the same way. Even now, large swathes of the sport remain stubbornly disdainful of the idea that darts can or even should be analysed. “I’ve heard pros say on TV they don’t believe in coaching, that it’s in our nature to just throw,” says Mardle, who combines his TV work with a coaching school. “And that breaks my heart. That kind of backward thinking, it’s nonsense. In golf, amateurs and pros swear by coaching. Come 10-15 years, the new breed of darts players will have coaches travelling with them. The barriers are being knocked down.” In part, you sense this is a product of heritage, the gradual and often fraught cultural transformation by which a pub game becomes a global multimillion pound industry. For thousands of aspiring tour players, darts is now a viable career option. And yet, Mardle observes, with increased professionalism something has perhaps been lost too: the characters, the showmen, the sense of lawless hedonistic fun that characterised his own era. “I wanted to be a clown,” he says. “I don’t think anyone wants to be a clown any more. It is frowned upon. Players are afraid of letting their guard down. You go up there, you concentrate, you do not muck around, you play to win. Peter Wright, Dimitri Van den Bergh, Michael van Gerwen, Gerwyn Price, that’s as close as we’ve got today. But as for me and Bobby, I don’t think that’ll happen ever again.” Not that he misses the life. Far from it. Partly it is a result of seeing the social media abuse many players cop these days, and of which he attracts his own share. “Sometimes I can hack it,” he says. “But at the moment I’m having a personal hiatus. The last year of my life has been horrendous. My mum died of lung cancer last July. My dad’s got advanced dementia. Sometimes I don’t need to pick up my phone to see ‘Wayne Mardle is a C-U-N-T’ for no apparent reason. And I know from being a professional sportsman: the highs and lows can take you to the edge.” Mardle’s book, in keeping with his life, reflects those highs and lows. Parts of it – the predictably bawdy stories of life on tour – are extremely funny. Parts are reflective and sad. Professionally speaking, life is good now. Darts is going from strength to strength; the work keeps rolling in; he knows himself better than he ever did. But if there is a note of wistfulness there, it is perhaps that the lessons he learned from darts came too late to save his career. “I remember being that kid on the up,” he says. “The 20-year-old turning up at Pontins, winning £1,000 and skipping home. But then I remember that downward spiral. I’ve always got slightly stressed. It’s why I wore the Hawaiian shirts. It was why I danced. It was why I was that clown. I was deflecting importance. And you know what? It worked.”